Data Warehouse

DuckDB vs SQL Server vs PostgreSQL for Analytics: SQL Server Standard's Ceilings, What They Cost, and What a Lakehouse Does Instead

SQL Server ships a real analytical engine and then fences Standard edition off from it: batch mode capped at 2 threads, a 32 GB columnstore cache, no batch mode on rowstore, no SIMD, no adaptive joins, all Enterprise at 3.83x the price per core. On one Apple M4 Max, DuckDB 2.0 ran six TPC-H-style queries over 60 million rows 18x to 47x faster than PostgreSQL 18, and DuckDB held to 2 threads still beat PostgreSQL on 8 workers by 3.7x to 8.6x. Where PostgreSQL's row store runs out, how a DuckDB lakehouse starts, what MotherDuck costs, and where DuckDB sits in AWS.